There’s a coyote in my neighborhood. Should I be worried?
The short answer
Probably not, and there is a good chance you have had coyotes nearby for years without knowing.
Take in the bird feeders and the pet food, secure the garbage, pick up fallen fruit, keep cats indoors, and walk dogs on a short leash. If a coyote does not move off when it sees you, make yourself loud and large until it does — and keep going until it has actually left, not just backed up.
Do not feed them, ever. That is the single thing that turns a coyote into a problem.
A coyote out in daylight is not a red flag
This is the most common reason people call us alarmed, and by itself it means nothing. Coyotes are active around the clock, and during pup season the parents hunt in daylight because a litter needs feeding constantly.
Daylight activity is only meaningful in combination with other things — approaching people, refusing to leave when hazed, hanging around the same yards repeatedly. On its own, a coyote trotting across your yard at two in the afternoon and continuing on is a coyote going somewhere.
The actual risk to people
Small, and worth putting in proportion without pretending it is zero.
Across the United States and Canada, one review documented 142 attack incidents over a forty-six-year period. Another counted 367 attacks between 1977 and 2015. In that entire record, across the whole continent, there are two human fatalities — one in California in 1981 and one in Nova Scotia in 2009. Dogs kill dozens of people a year in the United States alone.
So: rare, overwhelmingly non-fatal, and geographically concentrated — about half of all recorded incidents happened in California. But the numbers are rising, and two patterns in them matter for what you do.
First, season. Two thirds of California attacks happened between March and August, which is breeding and pup-rearing.
Second, and this is the important one: feeding. Human feeding was documented in about thirty percent of incidents overall, and in the Canadian urban attacks it was identified as a factor in every single case. A coyote that has learned people equal food is a different animal from one that has not. The neighbor who leaves food out is the mechanism by which a harmless coyote becomes a dangerous one.
Pets
Dogs are actually attacked more often than cats in the reported data, which surprises most people. The Chicago urban coyote study logged seventy attacks on dogs against ten on cats, with small breeds most vulnerable, and the peak was in winter — January through March, which is coyote breeding season.
The reason is that these are two different behaviors. Attacks on dogs are usually territorial: a coyote reads a loose dog as a rival canid, especially near a den or during breeding season. Attacks on cats are predatory. That distinction is why leashes work — a dog walking beside a person is not a lone rival canid.
How much do coyotes eat cats? Honestly, it depends enormously on the city, and we would rather give you the range than a tidy number. Chicago-area scat analysis found domestic cat in about one percent of samples overall. Los Angeles found around twenty percent in the most urban areas. Chicago is a much better comparison for Memphis than Los Angeles is. Coyotes here eat mostly rodents, rabbits, deer and fruit.
But free-roaming cats do get taken, and indoors is safer for a cat for about six other reasons anyway.
Six-foot leash, not a retractable one, especially January through March and April through August.
Do not leave small dogs unattended in an unfenced yard at dawn or dusk.
Go out with your dog at night rather than opening the door and waiting.
A six-foot fence, ideally with a roller or an outward-angled top.
Never let a dog approach or chase a coyote.
Hazing, and how to do it so it works
Hazing means making a coyote's encounter with a person unpleasant enough that it keeps its distance in future. It is not cruelty and it is not injuring the animal. It is restoring a wariness that got worn away.
Face the coyote. Do not turn your back.
Be loud and large. Yell, wave your arms over your head, stomp.
Escalate if needed. Shake a noisemaker — coins in a can works — bang pots, use an air horn, spray a hose.
Step toward it as you escalate.
Keep going until it has actually left the area. This is the step everyone skips.
That last point is the whole technique. If you stop as soon as it backs off twenty feet, you have taught it that twenty feet is a safe distance from a shouting human. Follow through.
The mechanism matters too: the coyote has to be able to see that the unpleasantness is coming from a person. That is why motion-activated sprinklers, ultrasonic gadgets and yelling through a closed window do not build the association. It has to be face to face, and it works far better when a whole neighborhood does it consistently than when one household does.
Never run. Running triggers pursuit and inverts the signal you are trying to send.
One exception: do not haze a coyote that appears sick or injured. Back away and call.
Escorting is not stalking
If a coyote follows you at a fixed distance while you are walking a dog in spring or summer, you are almost certainly near a den, and what you are seeing is an escort.
A parent coyote will parallel or trail a person with a dog until they are clear of the pups, then disengage. The tells are that it maintains distance rather than closing, it stops once you leave the area, it nearly always involves a dog, and it happens in the same one or two spots repeatedly.
Shorten the leash, face it, haze it, and walk away without running. Then use a different stretch of trail for a few weeks. Dens are abandoned by late summer and the behavior stops on its own.
Why trapping does not work
This is the request we hear most, and the answer is genuinely counterintuitive.
Removing coyotes creates a vacancy that fills. In a South Carolina study, an intensive program removed about seventy-five percent of the local coyotes — and genetic analysis afterward showed the same overall diversity as before, with the family structure broken up and replaced by unrelated immigrants moving in. The authors concluded coyotes recover quickly enough to undermine control efforts.
There is a second mechanism, well established in the wildlife literature though we would characterize it as a strong pattern rather than a settled number: under sustained pressure, coyote populations respond with larger litters, more yearlings breeding, and better pup survival, because the competition that normally suppresses those things has been removed.
And there is a version that can actively make things worse. An established territorial pair excludes other coyotes from its territory — it is doing free work for your neighborhood. Remove it and the space opens to several dispersing juveniles with no settled hunting patterns, who are more likely to experiment with novel prey, including pets.
So removal is a treadmill. It has to be repeated forever, at continuing cost, without changing the density.
In Tennessee, you cannot relocate one
TWRA is direct about this: it is illegal to transport live wildlife and release it somewhere else without a permit. A homeowner may not live-trap a coyote and drive it out to the country.
Beyond being illegal, it does not help the coyote either. A translocated coyote is dropped into territory that already belongs to other coyotes, and survival is poor.
On the other side of the ledger, coyotes may be hunted year-round in Tennessee with no bag limit, and state law allows landowners to destroy wildlife causing property damage. That is legal, and it is also the approach the research above suggests will not change how many coyotes live near you. If you have a genuine damage problem, TWRA permits animal damage control operators — though note TWRA does not regulate the quality of their work, so ask around.
For nearly everyone reading this, the effective intervention is not lethal. It is the garbage cans.
What is actually attracting them
In rough order of importance:
Someone feeding them, deliberately or by feeding stray cats.
Pet food and bowls left outside.
Unsecured garbage and open compost.
Fallen fruit. This one surprises people — fruit was over twenty percent of what Chicago coyotes ate, and forty-four percent at one site.
Bird feeders, not because coyotes eat seed but because spilled seed concentrates rodents, and rodents are the real draw. Small rodents were over forty percent of the Chicago diet.
Free-roaming cats and unattended small dogs.
Brush piles, deep ivy, and open crawl spaces and deck skirting, which offer cover and den sites.
It is almost certainly mange, not rabies
When someone describes a coyote that looks terrible and is out in the middle of the day, this is nearly always what they are seeing.
TWRA states it plainly: coyotes are not reservoir hosts of rabies in Tennessee. Nationally the wildlife reservoirs are bats, raccoons, skunks and foxes. The Chicago project reports no rabid coyotes at all across its study.
None of that means a coyote cannot contract rabies — it can, as a spillover from a reservoir species, and TWRA does list coyotes among the state's rabies vector species. Any bite from any wild mammal gets a doctor the same day. What it means is that a sick-looking coyote is far more likely to have something else.
Sarcoptic mange is the common disease, caused by a mite. It costs the animal its coat, which costs it the ability to stay warm, which makes it desperate for calories. That is why a mangy coyote turns up in yards in daylight looking for easy food — it is starving and cold, not neurologically ill. Patchy or near-total hair loss, thickened grey skin, a rat-like tail, visible ribs.
Do not approach it and keep dogs away, because mange does transmit to dogs. Report it to TWRA. Do not haze a sick animal.
When to call somebody
Any coyote that bites or makes contact with a person — call animal control and your doctor immediately.
Any coyote that appears sick or injured — call TWRA, do not haze, keep pets away.
A coyote that repeatedly does not leave when hazed, approaches people without a dog present, or comes into yards while people are out in them.
Short of that, the honest answer is that the coyotes were already there and the fix is the trash cans, the cat, and the leash.
Who we are
Out of the Woods Wildlife Rescue & Rehab is a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit in Memphis, permitted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Most coyote calls are questions rather than emergencies, and we are glad to talk one through. Text 901-340-6534.
Sources: TWRA coyote species profile and Wildlife Damage Control pages. Tenn. Code Ann. 70-4-115. White and Gehrt, coyote attacks on humans in the US and Canada. Baker and Timm, urban coyote attacks. Cook County Urban Coyote Research Project. Kilgo et al., USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station. Humane Society of the United States coyote hazing guidelines. CDC rabies surveillance.
We are wildlife rehabilitators, not lawyers. TWRA is the authority on Tennessee law.